HELP AND ADVICE FOR THE FIRST TIME HOMEBUYER.
Ah, the joys of owning your own home. Owning, as opposed to Renting, can have many advantages. You can have pets, use blue tack with abandon, or daub 'stop me before I kill again' in blood red letters across your living room walls with out fear of landlord wrath or deposit loss.
However, with such freedoms come great responsibilities. When things go wrong you cannot simply phone the letting agents and expect them to dash round and fix leaking taps or mend drain pipes that have turned 'foolish'.
Also, there is no one to blame for the errors made by previous owners. Their wayward attempts at DIY will come back to haunt you, and they will be long gone.
I was preparing to decorate my new abode, removing the dozens of nails and picture hooks that festooned the living room walls when, upon removing one particularly large nail I noticed gas issuing from the tiny hole. At first I was confused, I thought I'd burst the house, until I realised that the nail in question had been driven into an old lead gas pipe, and that this one rusty nail had been plugging the hole for god knows how many years. Years of deadly noxious gas seeping slowly into to the house….
Then, a few weeks ago I started hearing loud popping noises in the same room. "Odd", I thought. I checked all the electrical appliances and sockets but they seemed fine.The noises continued, so I unplugged everything and switched off all the sockets. Then I saw a great flash coming from one corner of the room! The very walls where exploding! Perturbed, I telephoned an electrician. He told me to turn off all the electric in the house and await his arrival. So there I sat. In the dark. Waiting.
Picture the scene. It's the early 80's and you're a young apprentice electrician. Your name is Barry. Your sporting faded denim, a thin blonde moustache and side burns like your dad. You tell your mates you think The Quo are 'ace' but secretly you yearn to be a New Romantic and wear eyeliner.
Your working on wiring up a new extension on a poxy little terrace in Blackpool. Its late Friday afternoon and your mind is on other things (Rubic's cubes, Ford Capri's and Boy George). You're thinking of that instead of doing the job in hand: wiring up the kitchen properly. Insulating the wires properly. You run the wire horizontal instead of vertical to save time. It doesn't matter, no one will know once its been plastered. Your shitty work will not come to light for another 20 odd years! Admit it! You Don't Know What Your Doing Do You, You Miserable 80's Fuck!
Fast-forward to 2004, and the same bit of wire is sitting in my hands, smouldering, freshly dug from the walls by the Emergency Spark. "That's the worst bit of wiring I've ever seen" he says. "its probably been burning away inside your wall for years". I sit there dumfounded, nervously eyeing the rest of the house and wondering what will go wrong next, when it dawns on me:
Leaking Gas Pipes + Exploding walls = Oh dear.
The Electrician gathers his things and prepares to leave. "I'll take that", he says grabbing the blackened bits of wire from my hands. "One for the Black Museum" he jests.
He begins to leave. Then I notice something...
Is he wearing eye liner?
*****************************************
I still haven't got round to murdering my neighbours. Their latest bit of mind torture involves repeatedly watching the final of Pop Idol on video. At 3 in the morning. Very loudly. And, even more bizarrely they follow this with The Worlds Strongest Man, all fucking night! My latest scheme is to send them 'free samples' of 'Oatsosimple' laced with ground-up glass, or releasing ravenous pigs into their house.
*****************************************
I bought one of them 'Lloyd Grossman' pasta sauces the other day. The label said, "I make it, so you don't have to". I waited all night for the cunt to show up, but he never did. I was starving.
*****************************************
What ever happened to Motorcycle Display Teams?
No comments:
Post a Comment